Microsoft has just announced Build 2012, the replacement for its long-running developer conference, PDC.

Microsoft's next developer conference will be this fall, and for the second year running it's called BUILD. It will be held on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, from October 30 until November 2, 2012.

This is the week after Windows 8 becomes available so there probably won't be any surprise announcements concerning Windows 8 or Metro apps. It will' however' probably be too early to have much of a feeling for how successful the new OS is - and you can rely on a certain amount of "talking up" going on. What you can look out for is news of Windows Azure, Windows Phone 8, Windows Server 2012, Visual Studio 2012, and much more.

BUILD 2012 will be held in Microsoft campus rather than a big convention center. This suggests that the number of places is going to be limited but Microsoft is currently being up beat and slightly mysterious about this

"this will be unlike anything we've held on our corporate campus in a long time."

However, apart from the "size" problem, it looks as if it is going to be more of the same as regards who is saying what:

"most of the speakers and participants are from our engineering teams, so a campus event puts you in the thick of things along with the engineers directly responsible for our products and the platform opportunities they represent. "

Registration for BUILD 2012 will open at www.buildwindows.com at 8AM Pacific time on 8.8, which would look good in octal!

This is also the date that the schedule and program will be made public - but this is better than last year when it looked as if the details were being worked out right up to the few hours before the event.

Somehow it can't really be as exciting as last year's inaugural BUILD event, but this is probably a good thing.